Holy cats on fire. If you are unfamiliar with the world of fandom — that subsection of humanity that cleaves so closely to pop culture that it makes up its own stories — then you don’t know what you’re missing. Namely a lot, and I mean a LOT of badly-made, poorly-written, horribly-acted films that do little more than scratch the kinky itch of those whose wish fulfillment fantasies demand release. You can skip most of them unless you’re in the mood for a cheap laugh.
Every now and then, however, something will rise to the top of the heap and win you over with great production values, surprisingly naturalistic acting, and a plot that actually entertains. Take a look at the trailer for the fan film “The Hunt For Gollum“, which is apparently based on something Tolkien wrote in the appendix to the Lord of the Rings.
How they managed to find two actors who both looked and sounded enough like Sir Ian McKellen and Viggo Mortensen to be able to maintain that precious (no pun intended) suspension of disbelief is itself quite a feat, but the premise is intriguing: as Sauron’s powerbase grows in strength, the One Ring awakens and calls out to Gollum. Gandalf, aware of the connection between the two, persuades Aragorn to track Gollum down before anything can be made of it all. The final film is 45 minutes long and is due to be shown at the Sci-Fi London film festival, which opened on the 29th. If any of our readers are there to see this thing, drop a comment and let us know how it was!
Comments
Clive
April 30th, 2009 - 6:34:48 PM
The Gollum fan film is getting a ton of coverage all over the net, and I'm not surprised as I've been writing about them on my daily fan film blog, fancinematoday.com for months. For what it's worth, if you want to find out more about fan films in general, I wrote the first book about the history and future of 'em, Homemade Hollywood, which just came out.